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Classics as Cost Center? 

DONALD E. LAVIGNE 

Texas Tech University 

 

 

When I sat down to formulate my ideas on the future of Classics, as luck would have it, the 

political pundits were littering the national discourse with an old catch phrase that has obviously 

gained new popularity these days: “It’s the economy, stupid!” As we debate the fate of national 

economies here and abroad, this rallying cry has found a new audience as another financially 

bleak election season begins. Classics (in fact, the international education system as a whole and 

especially its universities) has not been immune to the effects of this downturn,
1
 but the penny- 

pinching and budget-tightening started long before the current financial problems surfaced. 

Universities the world over have been dealing with trying financial times (real and imagined) by 

optimizing their management structures and aligning all their varying divisions more closely 

with their corporate goals. These changes have resulted in mission statements and assessment 

strategies, but, also, cost and profit centers. Normally, no self-respecting classicist would be 

caught dead reading a paper that had “cost center” in the title – the phrase smacks of the fabled 

boredom of the insurance seminar. Unfortunately, the times, they are a-changing – many of us 

have already been visited by our deans and/or chairs with just such terms prominently featured in 

their PowerPoint slides. It has happened at my university – luckily, I was hard at work at the 

Center for Hellenic Studies when the Dean showed up at my department this semester. Being a 

good corporate citizen, I decided to try to understand this system (even while on leave!) and 

these investigations, in turn, have led me to ponder the significance of such restructuring to the 

future of Classics and, indeed, the whole of the humanities. 

What exactly is a cost center? According to my source for all financial information, 

Wikipedia, a cost center is a unit that “adds to the cost of an organization, but only indirectly 

adds to its profit.”
2
 But it can be construed in another way, as it is at my university, as a discrete 

unit within a business that is responsible for its own budget – it pays out what it owes and keeps 

what it earns. The key, within either model, is that the unit has a manager who is directly 

responsible for the budget of that center, and each center is in direct competition for resources 

with other such centers. This market is regulated, at least at my university, to protect under-

performing centers, provided they further the mission of the University – it can also be regulated, 

say, to pay more per credit hour to science classes than to an equivalent level Classics course. 

This model is moralistically termed Responsibility Center Management, or RCM, for those in the 

know, and this is the road most large, public universities are traveling as the fetishization of 

accountability in the crudest of quantitative terms sweeps throughout this country and the halls of 

the Academy.
3
 



Classics as Cost Center?  24 

 

 

Obviously, my fairly negative rhetoric suggests that I think this is a woeful misstep that could 

have ill effect on the future of the Classics. I’m not sure that I believe that. But I’m also not sure 

that I don’t. When one looks at the raw numbers, it seems that Classics will be fine, and could 

even excel within such a paradigm, provided we keep offering large, popular lecture courses 

(profit) to offset the small, under-enrolled language courses (cost). Hopefully, within this 

framework, our programs can survive without becoming intolerably watered down. After all, we 

tend to be far ahead of our colleagues in the foreign languages in terms of culture courses, and 

even if we can’t hope to rival them (especially Spanish) in language course enrollments, the 

numbers of students studying Greek and Latin are not discouraging on the national level.
4
  

The potential problem as I see it is two-fold.
5
 First, the blatantly market-based approach offers 

little reassurance that smaller programs will remain aligned with the mission of a university. For 

instance, at my university, the higher value assigned to a science class is disconcerting not so 

much because it is unfair, as because it shows how the mission of the university is subject to the 

pressures of the times, e.g., the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) 

initiative and other similar federal and state pushes to encourage the study of (literally) profitable 

subjects. What I fear is that in this climate of Tea Party-style rugged individualism, which 

equates the free movement of capital with a certain conception of the freedom of democracy, and 

disregards people and institutions that “cost,” it might not be so prudent to integrate further the 

academy, especially public universities, into such a brazenly market-based system. We run the 

risk of endorsing the primacy of the Market as a legitimate means of assessing academic success 

or failure. Moreover, as a recent article in Inside Higher Ed suggests, what the market sees as 

profitable at present may not be so conceived in the near future; thus, there is a greater 

probability that education will be determined by ephemeral and marketable trends rather than the 

costly and “useless” curricula that have formed the backbone of the American university since its 

inception.
6
 The Market sees perfecting technical communication as a profit, but the reading of 

Homer (or Orwell) as a cost. If left unregulated (or poorly regulated), the university will sever 

the connection between the two pursuits.
7
 How can classicists be sure that the study of ancient 

Latin and Greek will stay in the black within such a system, especially as faculty lose more and 

more managerial say, and the managers become less and less akin to faculty in their career 

trajectories and day-to-day responsibilities? To say the least, this marriage to the Market should 

give those of us in the humanities pause and lead us to be vigilant of the regulatory commissions 

at our universities. 

Secondly, I fear that such an overt endorsement of the current, dominant Western ideology, a 

further alignment with the inexorable advance of consumer capitalism, can only be problematic, 

even if Classics can remain in the black. And here is where the immediate problem arises – the 

more like McDonald’s the Academy becomes, the more we seek to maximize profits and 

minimize costs, the more we have to compromise on quality, then the cheaper and faster we have 

to sling our Sophocles and Cicero, the more time we have to spend on brand management and 

customer relations. In a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Brian Hall did his 

rendition of what has become a cliché rant, detailing his experiences with students who approach 



25  Lavigne 

 

 

the college classroom as if it were a drive-thru window.
8
 If Classics – really, any humanities 

program – is to survive under such conditions, we’ll have to convince the customers that what 

they want is not the intellectual equivalent of a big, greasy cheeseburger and fries, but a giant 

bowl of broccoli over quinoa. And that will take some serious customer relations, which, of 

course, is the classic example of a cost center in the literal sense, that is, the division within a 

business that is nothing but cost and only indirectly, but essentially, contributes to profit.  

Now, we don’t have to like it, but, we do have to live with it – and, for the record, I think we 

will. As Settis has recently argued in his The Future of the ‘Classical’, it is precisely Classics’ 

propensity to renewal that has characterized the discipline (and should continue to do so). From 

the discipline’s origins as the study of Greece and Rome, three interrelated concepts lay at its 

center: continuity and transformation as well as the hybridity that interaction between the two 

entails.
9
 The study of Classics requires a recursive interpretive bridge, one between Ancient and 

Modern, but also one between Self and Other. The intellectual curiosity fostered by the impulse 

to compare, to bridge “us” and “them,” is a real strength of the study of classical antiquity; but, 

especially as focus shifts toward the literally profitable, we must be ever more careful to ensure a 

real engagement with ancient civilization grounds our comparative efforts.  

Unfortunately, the adaptive hybridity Settis sees as a property of Classics, and as a central 

feature of Classics’ contribution to Western culture more generally, is already at risk in the 

current intellectual environment. The connections that once bound the West into an intellectual 

whole have been trumped by the connectivity monster that is the modern web. No longer are 

major works of literature, philosophy and history read as a means of fostering intellectual 

connectivity; according to Sloterdijk, the demise of these “thick letters to friends” has 

destabilized the multi-temporal and -spatial dialogue that it is the duty of the humanities to 

foster.
10

 Instead of engendering a true multi-cultural dialogue, we scholars of the humanities 

have been reduced to caretakers of our archives, a format much better suited to the functionality 

of the Internet. If Classics and the humanities in general are to be more useful than as subject 

matter for effete pub quizzes, we must be more than archivists; we have to keep our thick letters 

in the minds of our students, and we have to foster the dialogue in ways that both honor its 

complexity and show how it contributes to the conversations of the moment within the Academy 

and society at large.  

Actively resisting our own reduction to archivists by sending our students into the stacks 

seems to me that the only way to fight the false equation (engendered by consumer capitalist 

mentality as well as ease of access) between information and knowledge (information is, in fact, 

superabundant and easily obtained online; knowledge is not). In the current academic 

environment, we have to destabilize the consumer capitalist mentality and show that the trove of 

information that every student has in the palm of his/her hand is not knowledge. I am hopeful we 

can temper the current changes with some of our stubborn dedication to time-honored ideas and 

practices. But we have to be careful not to give in totally to market demands. If we abandon the 

costly, difficult, long-standing aspects of the study of Greco-Roman civilization in favor of the 

profitable, easy, and novel, Classics is liable to become merely a dressing for the emerging “real” 



Classics as Cost Center?  26 

 

 

goals of a college education, an increase in student profitability. So, Classics (indeed, all of the 

humanities) needs to ensure we provide our students with a balanced diet, one consisting of 

intensive, serious critical engagement with ancient culture and a systematic analysis of the 

relationship between then and now, us and them. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1. See Papazarkadas for remarks on Greece, and Graziosi on Britain and Italy, both in this 

volume. 

2. Wikipedia, s. v. “Cost centre (business),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_center_ 

%28business%29. 

3. Many of the nation’s finest public universities have adopted this system, e.g., Indiana, 

Ohio State and Minnesota. Private universities have adopted the model as well, e.g., 

Harvard. 

4. According to the most recent MLA language enrollment survey (Nelly Furman, David 

Goldberg, and Natalia Lusin, Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United 

States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2006 (Modern Language Association, 

2007), http://www.mla.org/pdf/06enrollmentsurvey_final.pdf.), ancient Greek and Latin 

enrollments are up 12.1% and 7.9% since 2002, respectively. But, see Gephardt’s 

discussion in this volume for a possible indication of lower enrollments in the future. 

5. There is a third problem associated with the model, namely, the fact that RCM and other 

such de-centralized management structures offer little incentive for broad institutional 

collaboration (e.g., between colleges and other larger divisions within a university). I 

don’t discuss this issue here because it is operative on a larger level than that which is of 

immediate concern here. 

6. Russell A. Berman, “Foreign Language or Foreign Policy?” Inside Higher Ed, November 

2010, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/23/berman. 

7. In a related vein, Texas’ public universities are currently embroiled in a debate with Gov. 

Rick Perry, over his new accountability program, the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions,” 

which basically assess faculty performance according to raw enrollment numbers and 

research dollars in an effort to quantify the most profitable educators. Texas A&M used 

this system to formulate and publish a ranking of its faculty, printing, in order of 

profitability, the names of those who make money in black and the names of those who 

cost in red. This gross accounting seems nearly farcical, nonetheless, it has spawned a 

huge debate in Texas and is suggestive of the extent to which market forces can enter the 

management of the university. For an overview of the issues, see Paul Burka, “The Old 

College Try,” Texas Monthly, April 2011, http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011–04–

01/btl.php#. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_center_%28business%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_center_%28business%29
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/23/berman
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-04-01/btl.php
http://www.texasmonthly.com/2011-04-01/btl.php


27  Lavigne 

 

 

8. Brian P. Hall, “Educating our ‘Customers.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 

30, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/126916/. 

9. Salvatore Settis, The Future of the ‘Classical’, trans. Allen Cameron (Malden, MA: 

Polity, 2006), passim, esp. 109–11. 

10. Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for the Human Zoo: A Response to the Letter on Humanism,” 

trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.1 (2009): 

12–28. 

 

 

 

 

 

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/126916/

